Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-274) and index

1. Our Contemporary Predicament and Our Present Evolution of Consciousness -- 2. The Past Evolution of Consciousness: From Spirochete to Spinal Chord -- 3. Science and the Construction of Mythic Narratives about Human Origins -- 4. Weird Myths about Human Origins as Expressive of the Evolution of Consciousness from the Territorial Nation-State to Global Noetic Polities: The Strange Cases of Zecharia Sitchin and Rudolf Steiner -- 5. Prehistoric Sculptures: The Body as the Story of Time -- 6. From Prehistoric Sculpture to Folktale to Civilized Literature -- 7. The Hero versus the Initiate in the Masculine Encounter with Death: A Comparison of Osiris and Gilgamesh -- 8. The Patriarchal Construction of Culture and the Reimagination of the Female Body: A Comparison of the Enuma Elish and the Rig Veda -- 9. The Shift from the Arithmetic to the Geometric Mentality: Another Look at the Biblical Story of Samson and Delilah

In his best-selling The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, William Irwin Thompson intrigued readers with his thoughts on mythology and sexuality. In his newest book, Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, he takes the reader on a journey from the preverbal communications of early stone carvings to the writings of Marcel Proust and around the monumental wrappings of Christo to the rebirth of interest in the Taoist philosophy of Lao Tsu. Owing as much to the rhythmic constructions of jazz as to established methods of scholarship, Thompson riffs on biology and culture, seeing the birth of the mind in Proust's madeleine, the displacement of humanity in Christo's wrappings of the Reichstag, and the path forward into a new planetary culture in the Tao Te Ching. In Coming into Being, William Irwin Thompson presents a fascinating vision of our past, our present, and our future that no one will want to miss

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